A medical training telemedicine case study based on ultrasound images over an hybrid Power Line network

The growth of fast internet, including the recent advance on using PLC (Power Line Communication) for reaching rural and remote areas in Brazil, and the state-of-the-art of image compression methods allowed rapid teleconsultations and medical training based on medical images. At the present time, one of the challenging problems in telemedicine is the real-time teleconsultation in case of emergency and for the medical training at remote regions where the internet access is precarious. In this paper, we present the kickoff of the applied project PO@Health, which merges the European-Latin American T@lemed Project (telemedicine based on ultrasound images) and the Brazilian PLC Restinga Project (communication via Power Line in a remote district). The platform used for medical teleconsultations and residents training is able to perform both on-line (in real-time) and off-line image-based teleconsultations over the Internet connection. For the ultrasound cases, the platform is being adapted to work with the DICOM medical images synchronized with the physician hand position images of the examination in order to increase the diagnosis precision. In addition, we describe the hybrid network over PLC that is being used by the telemedical platform.